NOW
& UPCOMING
La
MaMa La Galleria presents Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks
in
"Pi=3.14...Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogota Endless Peripheral Border"
WHERE
AND WHEN
July 11-14, 2013
La MaMa La Galleria, 6 East First Street, NYC (betw. Bowery and
2nd Ave., East Village)
Gallery Hours: Thu-Sat, 1:00-7:00 PM; Sun 1:00-5:00 PM (free admission)
Performance Installation: Thu-Sat at 7:30 PM; Sun at 5:00 PM (seating
starts at 6:00 pm on Thu-Sat; 4:00 PM on Sun), admission $15.
July 11 Opening Night with Salsa Dance Party: $20
Box office: (212) 475-7710, www.lamama.org
Running time :60.
La MaMa's Galleria, 6 East First Street, will present Yoshiko Chuma
and The School of Hard Knocks in a new performance/installation
fusion work, "Pi=3.14...Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogota Endless Peripheral
Border," from July 11 to 14, 2013.
"Pi=3.14...Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogota Endless Peripheral Border"
is a collaborative work between the dancers of Yoshiko Chuma and
The School of Hard Knocks, daguerreotype artist Takashi Arai (Daguerreotype
is the 1830s photo process in which a direct positive is made in
the camera on a silvered copper plate) and video artist Kit Fitzgerald.
The performance is staged as a multi-disciplinary work within an
installation.
Yoshiko Chuma and members of The School of Hard Knocks International,
including Rebeca Medina, Coque Salcedo, Mina Nishimura, Tatyana
Tenenbaum and Felipe Gomez Ossa, will create choreography based
on the process of daguerreotype making. A description of that process
is contained in Chuma's
blog, "Daguerreotype:
Mirror with a Memory 2013-2015."
Yoshiko Chuma has been traveling widely, documenting artistic expeditions
to Ramallah, Fukushima and Bogota, where she has collaborated with
local troupes on performance works that investigate, among others,
themes of not being able to return home. She is currently engaged
in a series of works, under the common rubric "Daguerreotype:
Mirror with a Memory," in which she intentionally confuses
documentation with history. Chuma creates fictional fables of alienation
and diaspora by multi-layering choreography with texts, images,
filmed interviews, moving sculptures and video footage that she
has collected over her artistic career. She refers to them, metaphorically,
as "framing theater with barbed wire."
This performance will be built as an installation with live dance
components in a series of scenes that draw the audience into the
space from various viewpoints. Live music will be provided by Aska
Kaneko, a violinist, with composition by Christopher McIntyre. Elements
will include aspects of Colombian mythology, dances that were created
in Ramallah, and the seven-step process of daguerreotype photography
that will be abstracted into movement vocabulary.
Works by Takashi Arai (daguerreotype), Kit Fitzgerald (digital
paintings), Robert Flynt (photography), Dona Ann McAdams (photography),
Hugh Burckhardt (photography), and Gabriel Berry (artwork) will
be exhibited and will be part of the stage set for the performance
installation.
Backstage processes will be transparent to the audience. The stage
manager, costume designer and video/sound operators will be revealed
on stage so that the audience can experience a multi-dimensional
performance process as if they are observing it in a laboratory.
Each performance starts with Takashi Arai making a daguerreotype
of an audience member that he has selected.
The performance installation will be performed each evening, from
July 11 to 14, at 7:30. Tickets for July 12-14 are $15. The July
11 performance will contain an opening night party with salsa dancing
following the production; tickets for that night are $20. The La
MaMa box office is reachable at (212) 475-7710 and tickets can be
purchased online at www.lamama.org.
Much of Yoshiko Chuma's work is evolutionary, as is "Pi=3.14...Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogota
Endless Peripheral Border." It has roots in a dance work named
"Pi=3.14" that was created by Yoshiko Chuma for The Club
at La MaMa in 2002. That piece was based on a mountain of correspondence
and miscommunications between The School of Hard Knocks and people
in Hiroshima, Belgrade, Sarajevo and Kabul.
|